Human intelligence involves an ability that no-one has yet
undertaken to put in computer programs--namely the ability to
transcend the context of one's beliefs.

That objects fall would be expected to be as thoroughly built
into human mental structure as any belief could be. Nevertheless,
long before space travel became possible, the possibility of
weightlessness was contemplated. It wasn't easy, and Jules Verne got
it wrong when he thought that there would be a turn-over point on the
way to the moon when the travelers, who had been experiencing a pull
towards the earth would suddenly experience a pull towards the moon.

In fact, this ability is required for something less than full
intelligence. We need it to be able to comprehend someone else's
discovery even if we can't make the discovery ourselves. To use the
terminology of [43], it is needed for the
epistemological part of intelligence, leaving aside the heuristic.

We want to regard the system as being at any time within an
implicit outer context; we have used c0 in this paper. Thus a
sentence p that the program believes without qualification is
regarded as equivalent to , and the program can therefore
infer from p, thus transcending the context c0.
Performing this operation again should give us a new outer context,
call it . This process can be continued indefinitely. We
might even consider continuing the process transfinitely, for example,
in order to have sentences that refer to the process of successive
transcendence. However, I have no present use for that.

However, if the only mechanism we had is the one described in
the previous paragraph, transcendence would be pointless. The new
sentences would just be more elaborate versions of the old. The point
of transcendence arises when we want the transcending context to relax
or change some assumptions of the old. For example, our language of
adjacency of physical objects may implicitly assume a gravitational
field, e.g. by having relations of and . We may not have
encapsulated these relations in a context. One use of transcendence
is to permit relaxing such implicit assumptions.

The formalism might be further extended to provide so that in
the whole set of sentences true in is an object
.

Transcendence in this formalism is an approach to formalizing
something that is done in science and philosophy whenever it is
necessary to go from a language that makes certain assumptions to one
that does not. It also provides a way of formalizing some of the
human ability to make assertions about one's own thoughts.

The usefulness of transcendence will depend on there being
a suitable collection of nonmonotonic rules for lifting
sentences to the higher level contexts.

As long as we stay within a fixed outer context, it seems
that our logic could remain ordinary first order logic. Transcending
the outermost context seems to require a changed logic with what
Tarski and Montague call reflexion principles. They use them
for sentences like , e.g `` `Snow is white.'
is true if and only if snow is white.''

The above discussion concerns the epistemology of transcending
contexts. The heuristics of transcendence, i.e. when a system
should transcend its outer context and how, is entirely an
open subject.